Minnesänger wrote:

I was wondering how it was going to handle the continuous shot thing across platforms with different loading times, and the Guardian review suggests it's by hampering the PS5 version to keep them in line:

2018’s God of War’s most astonishing feat of technical wizardry was constructing the entire game as one continuous shot, with no loading screens and no interruptions, making you feel totally present in the journey. It did this by putting plenty of narrow passageways and low tunnels and other confined spaces in-between its areas, to disguise that the game was loading the next one. Ragnarök repeats this trick – even more impressively, this time, as we sometimes follow different characters and not just Kratos – but on the PlayStation 5 it’s all rather unnecessary, as that console is powerful enough to do away with loading times entirely. The forced moments of slowdown felt strangely ponderous and old-fashioned. I am looking forward to seeing what Santa Monica Studio will achieve without the almost 10-year-old PlayStation 4’s technical constraints to account for.

So this is a weird one. Cerny mentioned the whole squeeze through gap to hide asset loading thing during his Road to PlayStation 5 technical talk, and it's become this commonly known thing since then. The problem is that this is just one of the uses of the Gap Squeeze and I've seen a fair bit of push-back from devs recently when gamers / journos get hung up on the gap = hiding loading thing. Yes, the gap squeeze can be an asset dump / load opportunity, but it's apparently far more common for it to be able managing player progression and game pace. How do you funnel players from one combat arena to the next? How do you make sure they don't go backwards once the fight kicks off? How do you separate 2 puzzle spaces? How do you ensure that the player camera is facing in a direction from a tightly constrained space to reveal a surprisingly beautiful vista? The answer to all the above? The gap squeeze.  The gap squeeze is also useful as it informs the player that the gap = forward, so if they want to finish exploring an area, they should do so now. I often get frustrated when presented 2 "doors" and not knowing which one will trigger a cut-scene / un-go-backable event. The gap squeeze alleviates that. Point is, it's *most of the time* a creative choice by level and encounter designers.  Is that to say that they don't hide load screens in GoW? No, entirely possible they're used for that too. But GoW's a very deliberately designed game and when there were clearly load screens being hidden, i'd argue it was more obvious - the fast travel replacing mystical realm, for example.

Minnesänger wrote:

I mean, i'm talking last gen. Even last gen a lot of devs were using Gap Squeeze as level design, not loading. This has been stated by people who worked at Insomniac, Crystal Dynamics, Naughty Dog and a bunch of others.

Minnesänger wrote:

I'm also not sure where the idea comes from that shows Plague Tale: Requiem's  gap squeezes = current gen intentional design but GoW Ragnarok's don't. Yes, PT:R is "current gen only" but it's also on PC and the minimum spec is designed for is a HDD and GTX 970. Decidedly last gen.

FranticPea wrote:

I've cancelled my pre order over squeezegate. It was a deal breaker.